Lost in the flood of modernisation, ‘letterpress printing’, one of the oldest forms of typography, is a technique of relief printing that produces copies by impression of a raised, inked surface on paper. This is what Hassan Zahreddine, a Beirut-based illustrator demonstrated at the publishing company Tara Books over the weekend. Utilising the concepts of figure and ground, positive and negative, complex ideas of printmaking were reduced to comprehensible and elementary components.
Having studied fine arts and printmaking from Lebanon and Canada, Hassan is a children’s book illustrator and has many Arabic and Turkish novels to his credit. In Chennai for the second time, he first met Gita Wolf of Tara Books at a workshop for Arabic illustrators back in January. A zeal for exploring the subtleties of handmade print brought Hassan back to their gallery, to collaborate on techniques of woodcut and linocut. Explaining the advantages of relief printing, he said, “Its versatility is comes from the liberation from the confines of a studio and heavy machinery that is usually required in this profession.”
The illustrator took us through the tools and techniques that he normally uses, deftly carving a linoleum pad to reveal monochrome images of everyday objects. Using soft rollers lined with ink and a bamboo spoon, he rendered the outlines of an image directly onto paper, presenting a striking picture, replete with depth and details. He then proceeded to show a small booklet that narrated the story of a king who lost his crown. Its illustrations had been done with a set of stamps, created by etching into erasers. The workshop opened up a world of possibilities, engaging with the vivid and bizarre realms of our imagination. Papers, ink and stamps were passed around and soon, everyone, from kids to adults were busy creating trees of fish and three headed cats.
Relief prints allow readers to feel the texture of the ink making it a personal process months. Stuck between artists who are averse to replication and publishers who prefer to invest in digital printing, relief printing has dwindled into an elusive art form. However, Hassan maintains, “There is a lot of potential in the city, especially with publishing houses like Tara that focus on handmade books.”
